Tom Jokinen
Tom Jokinen was a veteran radio producer and video-journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., having worked on Morningside, Counterspin with Avi Lewis and Definitely Not the Opera, among many other CBC shows, when he set it all aside in 2006 to be an apprentice undertaker at a family-run funeral home and crematorium in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
This drastic vocational change at the age of 44 provided him with an amazing opportunity to explore, first-hand, our culture's relationship with the dead, dying, and left behind. The resulting book, Curtains, documents what he experienced and learned subsequently.
Previously, Jokinen has also worked as a railroad operator and an editorial cartoonist. He spent two years in medical school at the University of Toronto where he notably dissected two human cadavers before dropping out.
The author and his wife currently reside in Ottawa, Ontario.
“Scatter where you want, bury where you wish, but do something with intent, don't be passive and follow what commissioned pre-need salesmen consider the norm. Use your imagination, balance your own spiritual beliefs with guesswork, but do the work: accept that we know nothing about death, take a leap of faith, and have the courage to act anyway.”
“We worship entertainment as much as technology, and there's nothing less entertaining than grief. That's why God invented lorazepam, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and vodka and television - which in my experience work best in combination, with a pizza.”
“You should respect death and respect the dead, not out of fear, but because it's the proper human thing to do.”
“There's no need to fear the oblivion after we're gone if we never cared about the oblivion that came before we were born. Cheer up. Death obsessing is for boozy existentialists and bad poets.”